dpThe video is timestamped 30 March 1996. We see the back of a young woman’s head, her auburn hair cradled in a white scrunchie. She is crying quietly as the female judge reads out her sentence.
“It is ordered that you shall be put to death by execution as prescribed by law,” the judge says.
The woman’s shoulders start to quiver, and her weeping intensifies.
“Your body shall be subjected to shock by sufficient current of electricity that you shall die. May God have mercy upon you.”
The woman turns back towards the camera, urgently searching for her mother seated a few rows behind her. Her almost childlike face is peppered with acne.
“Can I please hug my mom before I go,” she wails. “Please, just let me have a hug. I love you.”
Those are her last words before she is taken away, without being allowed that hug, to death row. She would spend the next almost 30 years in solitary confinement.
Christa Pike had just turned 20 in the video. She was 18 on the night of 12 January 1995 when she and her then boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, brutally beat and murdered an acquaintance, Colleen Slemmer, 19, on a University of Tennessee campus.
The state of Tennessee has deemed Pike, now 50, to be among the “worst of the worst”, a cold-blooded murderer whose crime was so heinous that even being locked up until she dies of natural causes would be too lenient. She is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection at Riverbend maximum security institution in Nashville on 30 September.
There have only been three women executed by Tennessee since the state was founded in 1796, at least two of whom were enslaved people.
The most recent was more than 200 years ago, in 1819.
On Wednesday, Pike’s lawyers filed a 226-page clemency petition with Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee. The mercy plea presents Pike’s story through another lens, starting with her age at the time of the crime.
In the modern era of the US death penalty, Tennessee has never executed a person who was 18 at the time of their offence – the youngest was 23. Over the past 50 years, the state sent seven men who were 18 when they committed murder to death row, but in each case the sentence was vacated.
Shipp, Pike’s accomplice, held a fascination with satanic imagery. It was he who carved a pentagram in the victim’s chest, sending the local media into a frenzy. Yet because he was 17 at the time, he was barred from execution under Tennessee law; today he is serving a life sentence and had his first, unsuccessful, parole hearing in October 2025.
Had Pike been 10 months younger, she too would have been legally protected from the execution chamber. As time has passed, experts in children’s brains development have come to recognize that 18 is but an arbitrary line in the sand; adolescents – whatever their specific age – are susceptible to impulsive behavior.
And then there’s gender. Some argue that the gender of the 45 women who are now held on death rows across the US is irrelevant to their eligibility for the ultimate punishment. But in Pike’s case, it seems all too pertinent, given the agonising litany of sexual and physical abuse she endured throughout her childhood.
She was subjected to a bewildering array of abuse, including multiple rapes by three separate men and beatings by numerous relatives and their appendages.
Age. Gender. Abuse. The ingredients are all there, Pike’s legal team argues in the clemency petition for her crime, terrible though it was, to be recast in a different light.
Sandra Babcock, faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide who has been involved in Pike’s legal representation since 2019, has studied the cases of 48 women on death rows across the states. She has read all their trial transcripts, pored over all the evidence.
Her conclusion is that of all 48 women, Pike stands alone. The repetitive nature and severity of the sexual violence she endured, combined with the proximity of that violence to the crime she committed when she was barely an adult, makes her unique.
Babcock told the Guardian: “If they execute Christa Pike, it will confirm that the death penalty is reserved not for the worst of the worst, but for the most damaged and vulnerable among us.”
There is a second image of Pike that commands attention. It is a photo of her from when she was about two years old dressed in a red sweater.
She has that infant’s expression – part excitement, part apprehension – as though she doesn’t know what to expect from life.
The photo was taken around the time that Pike was first sexually abused. The details are contained in a forensic evaluation of the prisoner carried out in 2023 by Bethany Brand, a professor of psychology at Towson University.
Brand spent 13 hours in clinical interviews with Pike inside the Debra Johnson rehabilitation center in Nashville that houses the female death row (Pike is its only resident). At one point the prisoner grew distressed, crying as she described to the psychologist what had happened to her in the period “before I could walk and talk until kindergarten”.
Or to express that in years: between two and five.
The perpetrator, Ernest Johnson, was Pike’s paternal grandmother’s boyfriend. He was an alcoholic and drank all day, sending the grandmother out of the house to buy him liquor.
That’s when he would abuse the child. “Ernest orally raped her when she was in preschool,” Brand noted in her report. “Christa showed utter disgust on her face as she spoke of the smell of this man’s genitals – she was extremely revolted by him, despite more than 30 years having passed.”
Ernest forced her into silence about the abuse by threatening to hurt her pets, her grandmother and Pike herself. “Ernest locked Christa in a dark chicken coop where spiders crawled on her,” Brand wrote.
The abuse did eventually surface at Pike’s elementary school. In what now seems like a cry for help, she sketched a large penis and demon face in a drawing class.
If it had been a cry for help, it didn’t work. The teacher yanked her from her desk and marched her to the principal’s office where her parents were called, though no investigation was ever conducted.
At age 11, Pike was raped outside her house by a 37-year-old neighbor named Claude Davis who lived in a trailer up the street and who was well known locally as a pedophile.
Pike told her mother about the attack, but was disbelieved. Child protective services only became involved after Pike developed an infection from the violation.
Davis was arrested and pleaded guilty to taking “immoral, improper and indecent liberties” with a child. He was given a suspended sentence and allowed back to his trailer, a few minutes’ walk from Pike’s home.
In January 1994, almost a year to the day before she and Shipp committed the murder, Pike, 17, was attacked by a stranger. He grabbed her while she was walking to a store, dragged her into the woods and raped her in the dark. She fought back fiercely, hitting his head with a rock, and managed to escape. A rape kit was taken in hospital, but the man was never identified.
All the rapes – whether at infancy, or at 11, or 17 – were known to people in authority, in the latter two instances by law enforcement. Which makes it all the more puzzling that so little was done to help her.
“As a young girl, she was truly on her own, without loving support, treatment or protection,” Brand writes in her forensic evaluation.
Pike was arrested and put on trial. Despite the documentation of sexual abuse, none of those events were presented to the jury in mitigation.
Pike had by then been convicted of first-degree murder. The only decision left for the 12 jurors was whether she should be imprisoned until she died of natural causes, or dispatched to death row to await execution.
The lawyer representing her at this stage of the trial was four months out of law school and had never tried a murder case, let alone one where a life was at stake. In their summary, counsel made no mention of Pike’s youth despite it being recognised as a mitigating factor under Tennessee law, nor did they refer to the absence of any significant criminal record.
“None of the rapes, none of the sexual abuse as a child, were introduced,” Kelleigh Gleason, one of Pike’s clemency lawyers, told the Guardian. “Trial counsel were aware of most of that – it was documented by law enforcement – but they chose not to use it.”
Nor did the jury get to hear about the years of physical abuse and neglect, in which Pike was made by her great-aunt Norma to sit in a bathtub of cold water for hours on end, beaten with an improvised leather whip by one of her five stepfathers, and exposed as a preteen to hours of pornography.
The jury never heard that she attempted suicide at least three times as a child, the first when she was 12.
The jurors had no idea when they condemned her to death that in early adolescence she developed bipolar disorder, a condition that periodically erupted in bursts of hyper and manic behavior that could have helped explain her violent explosion in murdering Slemmer. The condition was only diagnosed years after the trial.
Pike described to Brand what those manic spells felt like: “My hair and skin hurt, I’m rocking, my skin is crawling. I want to claw my face off. I claw and claw and claw the skin on my legs to the point of bleeding. It feels like bugs are crawling under my skin.”
Pike’s clemency petition draws these details together, and uses them to present Tennessee’s governor with a choice. Significantly, the mercy plea does not call for forgiveness. It does not suggest that the prisoner should ever walk free.
It states plainly that Pike “chose to participate in the circumstances which spiraled out of control and led to Colleen Slemmer’s death. For that she should be punished severely,” by spending the rest of her life behind bars.
What the petition does argue is that Pike is not the “worst of the worst”. “Christa was broken, not evil,” it says. “She was broken by a mental health, juvenile, and criminal justice system that ignored, misdiagnosed, and mistreated her at every turn.”
Tennessee has not disputed any of the details of the abuse. At a recent hearing, an attorney for the state, Will Ayers, said: “I think everybody in this courtroom wishes that those things had never happened to Ms Pike. We all wish that we were not here today and that she was not on death row.”
The baton now passes to Governor Lee who has the power to commute Pike’s death sentence to life without parole. Were he to do so, it would be a first.
“Lee has never granted clemency in a death case,” Gleason said, referring to the many previous appeals that have crossed his desk. She pointed to his scorecard when it comes to showing mercy.
“He is zero for eight.”
In May 2024 Lee signed into law legislation that extended the death penalty in Tennessee to cover those who rape a child. The move was blatantly unconstitutional – the US supreme court has long prohibited executions for crimes where nobody is murdered.
But it made a punchy statement. When lawmakers were debating the bill, they argued that child rapists deserve the ultimate punishment because the damage they inflict on their young victims “has a permanent psychological, emotional, and sometimes physical impact on the child”.
Now Tennessee is just days away from executing a victim of multiple child rapes.
Since that video was filmed of Pike wailing uncontrollably for her mother as she was taken away to death row, she has spent almost three decades in solitary confinement. She was held in an 8ft-by-10ft cell for up to 24 hours a day.
As the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, her isolation was near total – a far more restrictive regime than that reserved for male condemned prisoners. On the rare occasion that she did come across another human beings her notoriety went before her – she was leered at and objectified as a female killer. She felt, she said, like a “ballerina kept in a box”.
Two years ago she won a lawsuit that slightly loosened the conditions of her incarceration. She can now spend a few hours with one or two other female prisoners outside her cell.
Her lawyers say she is doing well. She is finally being treated for the bipolar disease that for years went undiagnosed, and her extreme mood swings have been brought under control. She is, the clemency petition says, “thoughtful, even-tempered, bright, funny, and hopeful”.
The petition stresses that she shows deep remorse for Slemmer’s death. And she has become something of a mentor to new arrivals in her prison unit, offering them guidance and support.
No matter how improved her mental health, she is finding it hard to cope with her pending death. Her execution date was set a year to the day in advance, on 30 September 2025, and since then she has had to negotiate every milestone.
Gleason, her lawyer, said: “She had to think, ‘Is this my last Thanksgiving?’ ‘Is this my last Christmas, how am I going to spend it?’ She turned 50 in March, and it was, ‘Is this my last birthday?’”
Should last-minute legal challenges fail and the execution go ahead, Pike’s lawyers have requested that only female corrections staff should be present in the death chamber. The state of Tennessee has declined to guarantee that will happen.
And so she faces the possibility that she will be pinned down on the gurney by men, who will pierce her restrained body looking for a lethal injection vein. Pike is terrified of a repetition of the multiple male violations inflicted on her as a child.
Only this time, there will be no prospect of healing.
